mp2: delay of gratification In this project, we will assess primates’ ability to resist the temptation of an immediate reward in order to receive a larger or better reward later on.
Data collection is open until August 2023 - Get in touch at [email protected] to get involved! Delay of gratification involves the ability to resist the temptation of an immediate reward in order to receive a larger or better reward at a later point in time. It is a type of self-regulation and is closely related to concepts such as patience, impulse control, self-control, and willpower. Delay of gratification is involved in a variety of adaptive decision-making processes (e.g. planning, foraging, risk taking) and has been linked to health as well as economic, social, and academic achievement in humans. Several tasks have been used to assess delay of gratification in the past; we decided to use the accumulation task (Beran, 2002) as our main task. In this task, a limited number of food rewards slowly accumulate until the subject takes them and stops the accumulation process. We chose this task because we can include a wide range of difficulty levels (by varying the speed of accumulation) to capture the variation we expect to be present across species and individuals, and because it is a relatively easy task to implement. We would also like to include a second task: the exchange task (see e.g. Pele et al., 2011). In this task, subjects are given a food item that they can later trade for a larger quantity. The level of difficulty is determined by how long subjects need to keep the food reward without eating it before they can exchange it.
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Japanese macaques (or snow monkeys) are generally considered to be a despotic species but cooperation with other group members (especially kin) is an important aspect of daily life. This includes support during intragroup aggression but also safety from the elements as part of a huddle. Due to their reputation and their rarity in captive settings, there are very few studies of cooepration in Japanese macaques. However, recent findings have shown intreresting variation in tolerance and cooperative success between groups.
Our latest project is delving further into the social dynamics of cooperation in this species with the group of 34 Japanese macaques living at the Highland Wildlife Park, Kincraig, Scotland. We are using a food-provisioning task that the whole group have access to along with observational data of their social relationships (social bonds and hierarchy). Working together requires us to coordinate our decisions and actions with others, we need to be doing the right thing, at the tight time, with the right person. In a series of studies I have looked at how the tools children and great apes use to coordinate.
Often we need to coordinate different preferences. With Alex Sanchez-Amaro (University of California, San Diego) we looked at how chimpanzees and children manage these conflicts of interest. Establishing a Culture of Collaboration in Primate Cognition ResearchThe ManyPrimates project was initiated to facilitate collaboration across study sites in primate cognition research. By joining forces, we hope to address important outstanding questions that individual labs could not answer by themselves.
The evolutionary Roots of Human Collaborative Problem-solving: Insights from Chimpanzees Collaboration is ubiquitous to humanity. Most major human successes and discoveries would not have been possible without the capacity to put our heads together to solve new problems. Communication is critical to this ability: we are often able to engineer successful cooperation through sharing information with collaborative partners. Funded by the Templeton Foundation Diverse Intelligences Initiative, the aim of this project is to learn about the evolution of human collaborative problem solving by asking how one of our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, use communication for collaboration.
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